‘Pass me your knife.’
He sawed through the straps.
‘Leave him,’ said Ghost. ‘I don’t like it. Doesn’t feel right. The whole thing.’ He took a red, cylindrical grenade from his coat pocket. ‘Call it a cremation.’
‘Hold on. Someone, somewhere, will want to know what happened to this guy.’
Rawlins tried to twist the helmet free. He couldn’t release the lock ring. He gave up. He pushed the lift-tabs at the corner of the visor. The gold face-plate slid back.
A young man’s face. Mirror skin, like he was sculpted from chrome.
Eyelids flicked open. Jet-black eyeballs. A silent snarl. Metal lips, metal teeth.
Rawlins screamed.
Contamination
Punch stood in the kitchen storeroom with a clipboard. Stock check. Jane surveyed the shelves.
‘Kidney beans: six cans. Rhubarb: three cans. Chopped tomatoes: two cases of twelve.’
They contemplated the dwindling supply of cans and cartons.
‘Good job we keep this place locked,’ said Punch. ‘If the guys glimpsed how little food we have left they would panic for sure.’
‘Maybe we should reduce portion size,’ said Jane. ‘Use rice and pasta for bulk.’
‘There must be someone on board who knows how to fish. Remind me at dinner, when everyone is in the canteen. I’ll ask around.’
They heard running feet. The squeak of trainers on tiles. Sian stood panting in the doorway, holding the frame for support.
‘There’s a message from Ghost. Rawlins is hurt. Injured or something. They’re on their way back.’
They descended the leg of the refinery and stood on the ice. Jane scanned the horizon with binoculars. The zodiac was a black dot approaching fast.
‘Jeez,’ said Punch. ‘He’s pushing it hard.’
Ghost swerved the boat to a halt, kicking up spray. He killed the engine. Rawlins lay at the bottom of the zodiac. His right arm was wrapped in a foil insulation blanket. They dragged him from the boat and laid him on ice surrounding the refinery leg.
‘Don’t touch him,’ said Ghost. ‘Don’t touch his skin.’
They hauled Rawlins across the ice to the deck of the platform lift. The lift was bolted to the south leg of the refinery. They laid him on the floor plates.
‘Where’s Dr Rye?’ asked Ghost.
‘Waiting at the top.’
‘Okay. Punch, you had better stay behind and secure the boat.’
Ghost jabbed the Up button. The elevator jolted to life.
Jane leaned over Rawlins. His face was hidden beneath a ski mask and goggles.
‘Is he conscious?’ she asked.
‘He moves now and again. He’s not talking.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘Easier if you see.’
Rye met them at an airlock. She helped carry Rawlins inside and lay him on the stretcher buggy.
Convulsions. Rye wriggled on nitrile gloves. She pulled off Rawlins’s mask and goggles. His eyes rolled. His lips were blue.
‘No skin contact,’ warned Ghost. ‘No mouth-to-mouth, whatever you do.’
Rye ripped open Rawlins’s coat. Twenty chest compressions.
‘He’s breathing. All right. Let’s go.’
The buggy’s headbeam lit the way as she steered down dark corridors. Jane, Sian and Ghost jogged behind, keeping pace as best they could.
Medical. Rye restored power. The white room lit up.
They laid Rawlins on the examination table. Rye re-angled the light canopy above him.
‘There’s a convection heater in my office,’ said Rye. ‘Get it going.’
She put on a mouth mask and goggles. She wriggled on a pair of surgical gloves.
‘Okay. You folks better get in the office and stay there.’
They sat in Rye’s office and watched through an observation window.
Rye took scissors and forceps from a drawer. She snipped through the foil blanket that sheathed Rawlins’s arm and peeled it back. Blood dribbled on the floor.
‘Treat every drop of that shit like AIDS,’ advised Ghost, via a wall-mounted intercom. ‘Scrub it. Bleach it.’
Rye scattered swabs on the floor to sop the blood.
‘And be careful with his arm,’ said Ghost. ‘Don’t touch it, whatever you do.’
Rawlins’s hand had turned dark, skin mottled like a bad bruise.
‘Frostbite?’ asked Jane.
‘No.’
‘Are you sure? Looks like Simon’s hand when we pulled him off the ice.’
‘Look closer.’
The flesh bristled with needle-fine splinters of metal.
‘My God.’
Rye sliced away Rawlins’s clothes with trauma shears. She plucked dog-tags from his neck.
‘O neg.’
She wriggled on a double layer of gloves and canulated Rawlins’s left hand. She took a bag of O neg from the fridge and set it to feed.
‘His heart rate is high,’ said Rye. ‘His breathing seems unimpaired. So what actually happened?’
‘We opened the capsule. Frank crawled inside. There was a body, an astronaut. Frank tried to take off his helmet. Next minute he was screaming and bleeding.’
‘An astronaut?’
‘Some kind of cosmonaut. He was dead. Way dead. Then he woke up. He grabbed Rawlins. They fought. I hauled Frank out of there and torched the whole thing.’
‘His fingers. That looks like a bite mark.’
‘Yeah. Frank said something about teeth, metal teeth. I don’t know. Frank wasn’t making a lot of sense. Like I said, I didn’t investigate. I didn’t climb inside. I hauled Frank out and threw a grenade.’
Rye took tweezers and tugged at a metal spine.
‘These filaments seem to be anchored in bone.’
‘It’s spreading. It started at his fingertips. Now it’s reached his wrist.’
Rawlins woke. He licked his lips.
‘How are you feeling, Frank?’ asked Rye, leaning close.
‘Don’t take my arm.’
‘You’ll be okay,’ she soothed. ‘We’ll fix you up.’
‘It tastes funny,’ said Rawlins, and passed out.
‘Right,’ said Rye. ‘You three. Get your coats off and scrub up. I need you in here.’
They lathered their hands and forearms in Bioguard scrub.
Rye unlocked a cupboard. She took out a tray of surgical instruments and slit open the vacuum-sealed plastic. She unwrapped a surgical saw and laid it on the surgical trolley.
‘What do you have in mind?’ asked Sian.
‘You’re going to help me amputate his arm.’
‘Don’t you have anything more high-tech than that?’ asked Jane, pointing at the saw.
‘I’ve got an electric blade but I don’t want to spray blood everywhere.’
They gave Rawlins a shot of morphine and strapped him to the table. Rye intubated his throat. She wheeled a heart monitor to the table. She pasted electrodes to Rawlins’s chest and set the machine beeping.
‘Watch the screen,’ she told Sian. ‘If that figure drops below thirty-five, yell.’
She took saline from the refrigerator and hung it from the drip stand.
‘Keep an eye on the bags,’ she told Jane. ‘Let me know when he needs a refill.’
She swabbed Rawlins’s arm just below the elbow.
‘Ghost. Keep hold of his shoulders, okay? He could buck. Right. Everybody ready?’
Rye sliced into Rawlins’s arm with a scalpel and clamped his arteries. Yellow globules of subcutaneous fat glistened like butter.
She sawed his arm. She worked through bone in short rasps like she was sawing through a table leg.
‘Think he will be okay?’ asked Jane when they had finished.
‘I’ll give him another shot when he wakes. After that, it’s aspirin.’